Last week I shared with you, my loyal readers, my desire to make every day an Earth Day and how, once I gained the nigh-inexhaustible resources of Bill Gates through a combination of deceit and intimidation, I would then use those resources to make that eternal Earth Day happen. More exactly I began to describe how I would use the undeniable power of human greed to establish the poverty creating policies and penny pinching practices championed by guilt ridden Earth Day types and then bend them to my will.
What first planted this particular idea in my head was the constant waste I see every time I drive down the beloved highways of my hometown. I began to notice not long ago how much trash and garbage was piled up along the right of ways and shoulders of the highway and, honestly, it made me sick. Here we had acres and acres of land that are essentially enormous lawns being covered with trash and nobody seems to care! Nobody recognized the waste whizzing past our very eyes.
Which is why if I had the wealth of Bill Gates I would buy up the rights to the right of ways and shoulders along out nation’s highways and fix this problem by building thousands of cheap, shoddily built apartments and plant acres of of labor intensive vegetables and grains, all right up to the asphalt. Of course they would be built out of reinforced concrete and steel so that the unavoidable car crashes wouldn’t do to much damage, and in fact they would probably mostly look like giant retaining walls with windows cut into the concrete, but I doubt most people would care. I would then rent out my tenement buildings at prices so cheap that the poor and impoverished would have almost no choice but to come and live in my buildings, say $20 a month for a high end apartment, maybe $5 for a low end apartment. With prices that low people would travel from across the world to live in my dwellings, even thought they would have to burn the Styrofoam they found by their roadside homes to stay warm. This nation would probably see a surge in illegal immigrants based solely on the dream of being able to live for almost free in my shanty town by the highways. Of course that would send the price of goods and services within my city rocketing to the sky and any available jobs would be snatched up faster than new ones could replace them and mind numbing poverty would ensue. At least until the free market could find a way to exploit a huge pool of manpower with almost no expenses for shelter. Stupid free market.
So to stop the market and feed my new made urban mob I would set the poor beggars to tending my fields of organically grown vegetables. This strong back/weak mind work would be exactly the kind of thing that would keep this proletariat from getting out of line and would allow me to pay them a bare pittance for them to survive on but still allow me to think about the nobility of man working the soil for an honest day’s wage and of how I am saving the Earth by planting so many organic crops and getting so many people to live on so little of Mother Earth. It would also be very profitable for me in particular having my own army of virtual serfs. I just would have to convince people that the “cost of living” was so low as to justify my impoverishing them more and more, which I think my artificially deflated housing costs would do.
Now some of you may be saying “Bob, that is not in the spirit of Earth Day. How can you even think that building a shanty town and its accompanying latifundia would do any good for the environment?”
To which I would have to reply, “Of course this is in the spirit of Earth Day!” The point of Earth Day is not about doing any one or any thing any good! If it was about helping the environment then environmentalists would make sure to listen to every opinion about what shapes our environment like a worried mother listens to every opinion about what various medicines can do to her baby, which clearly they do not.
Earth Day is about making people feel guilty about having plenty and to try to force them into a life of poverty in the name of justice and the environment and trying to make people revert back to an idealized state where they are in “communion with nature,” i.e. where people have to break their backs eking a bare existence from the Earth.
And that is exactly what my plan would do!
Everyday children would “nurture Mother Earth” by sifting through garbage for scraps of trash to recycle for pennies. Orphans would weed acre after acre of tomatoes as semi-trucks whizzed past their work place. Sure a few of them may get hit, but that will just allow me to see that vehicles will have to be pulled through town by gangs of (my own) licensed vehicle pullers, an action that will ensure fewer children’s deaths from truck accidents, more protection for dear old Gaia from those nasty exhaust fumes, and a larger, more thoroughly materially and mentally impoverished pool of workers more and more dependent upon me and my ever growing pile of cash.  Just like in the Third World!  It would truly be Earth Day, Every Day.

-Bob

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